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arXiv · 1811.04262

Optical Analogue of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Dispersion-Oscillating Fibre

Stefano Vezzoli·Arnaud Mussot·Niclas Westerberg·Alexandre Kudlinski·Hatef Dinparasti Saleh·Angus Prain·Fabio Biancalana·Eric Lantz·Daniele Faccio
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Abstract

The dynamical Casimir effect is the generation of pairs of real particles or photons from the vacuum as a result of a non-adiabatic change of a system parameter or boundary condition. As opposed to standard parametric amplification where the modulation occurs both in space and in time, this fundamental process requires a pure modulation in time, which makes its detection particularly challenging at optical frequencies. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate a realisation of the optical analogue of the mechanical dynamical Casimir effect in the near-infrared optical regime in a dispersion-oscillating photonic crystal fibre. The experiments are based on the equivalence of the spatial modulation of the fibre core diameter to a pure temporal modulation when this is considered in the co-moving frame of the travelling pump pulse. We provide evidence of optical dynamical Casimir effect by measuring quantum correlations between the spectrally resolved photon pairs. The non-classical nature of the measured light is supported by evidence of anti-bunching photon statistics.

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Stefano Vezzoli, Arnaud Mussot, Niclas Westerberg, Alexandre Kudlinski, Hatef Dinparasti Saleh, Angus Prain, Fabio Biancalana, Eric Lantz, Daniele Faccio. 2018-11-10. Optical Analogue of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Dispersion-Oscillating Fibre. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04262

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